


draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 18:04:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1992576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I'm fine.  I'll be fine.  I mean I— I am fine.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen

 

> No, no, not that,—it’s bad to think of war,  
>  When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;  
>  And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad  
>  Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts  
>  That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
> 
> Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.  
>  Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen,  
>  And you’re as right as rain...
> 
> Siegfried Sassoon, “Repression of War Experience”

i. _“Your mom still alive?” “Maybe.”_

He takes up more room in her doorway than his gangly form should account for. Caramel-colored hair wrapped in a greasy red bandana, army boots, hand-rolled cigarette. Tattoos she doesn't remember from before—skulls and ravens and words in a language she can't wrap her tongue around, like the names of the villages that dotted his letters like inkblots.

She's not particularly happy to see him. It was just a fling, like any other, albeit a fling with unforeseen consequences. And his letters were fucking _weird_. Still, when he crouches before the boy and chucks him gently under the chin, and he doesn't run to hide behind her skirt but just stares back, appraising the man before him with a matching guarded blue stare—she feels something unravel in her then, like a rope that had been knotted up too tight for too long.

“His name's Rustin,” she says. It's the town in Louisiana where her granddaddy grew up; she always liked the sound of it, though she spelled it wrong on the birth certificate.

“Hey, Rustin,” he says softly, like the kid's an animal he doesn't want to spook. He reaches into his battered knapsack and pulls out a rough-hewn, blocky piece of hand-carved wood in the approximation of a helicopter. “Made you somethin.' Your old man used to ride around in one of these. Whaddaya think of that?”

The boy looks back over his shoulder briefly, as if to read the weather on his mother's face, then turns back and takes the helicopter in his hands. He settles on the floor, cross-legged, and starts to examine the rotor, which looks to be made from discarded popsicle sticks. _He already likes him more than he likes me_ , she thinks, but she's not surprised. Travis has a way of looking at you like you're the only thing in the world. It's not always a nice feeling.

“He's gonna get splinters on that damn thing, Travis.”

“So we'll pull 'em out if he does. Christ, woman.”

He settles on the worn-out carpet next to the boy and starts to explain the different parts of the helicopter. She sits in an old recliner and smokes and watches them. She thinks of her momma, of the cars or relatives' couches they slept on after she got fired for stealing again and again. She thinks about her child, her weird, wary-eyed boy who barely talks and who sneaks out onto the fire escape every night to look up at the sky. “No,” he says petulantly when she picks him up to bring him back inside their tiny one-room apartment, “too _small_ in there, Mama.”

She thinks about the things she's had to do to keep a roof over their heads, and how she's sick of doing them.

She waits until Travis goes out for cigarettes, then quickly packs her suitcases and puts them in the back of her car. When she hears his heavy boots on the stairs, she brushes sweat-soaked curls from her sleeping son's forehead, says “be a good boy, Rusty,” and slips quietly out the back door. She tells herself it's just for a week or two, clear her head, get a break from the oddly intense little stranger who follows her everywhere. But she knows better, and so does Travis—she's packed every piece of clothing she owns.

He'll be damned if he's gonna be stuck with the rent on this piece-of-shit apartment in this hellhole state, though, so he picks up the boy's clothes and teddy bear and shoves them into his knapsack. “We're going on an adventure,” he tells the child when he wakes from his nap, wide-eyed and confused, clutching the wooden helicopter. “I bet you never seen snow.”

 

ii. _“You know, my dad, I had about six inches on him, and even in the end, I still think he could have taken me.”_

Patricia wakes early one morning to the sound of her son crying. It's not an unfamiliar sound; Martin is an easily frustrated child who cries when he's tired, when he's scared of monsters in his room, when he can't figure out how to tie his shoelaces even though he's only four. But this is different; this sounds like real pain, real fear.

He's in the corner, holding his nose in one small hand. She runs to his side and pulls him into her lap. His nose is red, already beginning to swell.

In their bed Eric is sitting bolt upright, expression dazed. “Marty, I—”

“What did you do?”

“I didn't mean to. I was asleep, I guess he came in and grabbed my shoulder—”

“He was just waking you up. You're supposed to take him fishing today, he was _excited_. You didn't have to punch him.” She brushes yellow hair back from the boy's forehead as his sobs recede into whimpers.

“I didn't _mean_ to. You know what happens sometimes when I get woke up all of the sudden, Patty.”

She knows. At their wedding reception—Eric so handsome in his uniform, albeit with a weariness around his eyes that hadn't been there in the early days of their courtship—the major had taken her aside and spoken to her in low tones. _He's a good man, Mrs. Hart, the best I know. But you should be prepared. He may not be like he was before_. They even had a word for it— _battle fatigue_ , it was called. Well, it didn't seem like fatigue to _her_. Seemed like he was always on edge, waiting for an explosion that never came, and her waiting with him.

“It's been _ten years_ ,” she hisses, picking up Marty to carry him into the kitchen and calm him with ice cream. “We should be done with all this by now.”

 

iii. _“Cohle ever talk about his parents?” “No. Little bit about his dad--Alaska, Nam.”_

Travis had written her letters—most of them were X-rated and some of them, after he’d discovered the poppy fields of the Tam giác Vàng, weren’t particularly coherent. She’d left them behind on the bed when she went, bound up in a cracked rubber band. They're Rust's first clear memory: wrapped up in a blanket on a cot in the corner, watching in fascination as snow fell ceaselessly outside the window while Travis fed the letters, one by one, into the wood-burning stove.

She'd written him letters too, though not as many, and they'd been destroyed in a storm that had damn near washed the whole camp away. He remembers one of them in particular, though, dated March of '62. He flips through the stack until he finds his reply, and reads it one last time before burning it with the others.

_Eileen—it made me glad to receive your news though you did not seem glad to give it. It's true I don't know too much in the way of fatherhood (my own having left when I was small) but you should know that I am not a man who shirks my responsibilities & will do my part. The world is burning down around us—perhaps our child will survive all this to build something new. You are in my thoughts, I hope I am still in yours—Travis_

 

iv. _“My mother? Donna Reed type. Packed lunches, bedtime stories.”_

Marty knows his old man wrote letters, too. He asks his mother once, near the end of her life, what happened to them. His dad's still alive, will be for another five years, but Marty knows he'd never get an answer out of him.

She says she can't quite remember where they are, that they must have been misplaced when they moved to the bigger house out in the suburbs, when Marty was ten. But the truth is she'd packed them up carefully in her hope chest, in between the linens and her wedding trousseau, tied in a wide pink ribbon; then tucked them away in the back of her lingerie drawer when they'd settled in the new place. And then when Marty was twelve one of his dad's Marine buddies had had one too many on New Year's Eve and started telling stories involving a phrase Marty didn't understand and wouldn't remember later, something called _special comfort units._

She never discussed the incident with her husband; she simply cut his letters into a thousand pieces with her gardening shears and buried them in the kitchen trash, under the coffee grounds and orange peels.

 

v. _“That place—it reminded me of my pop talking about Nam. The jungle.”_

When Rust thinks about Alaska, he thinks about the war. It's a strange sensation, like standing in knee-deep snow looking through a window into a house that's on fire. Hauling a fresh kill back to the cabin, ice pelting down all around them, Travis's rough voice painting humid jungles and strange birds so vivid you almost felt warm. You didn't ever want to say “it's so cold I can't feel my feet” unless you were ready for six stories about guys who got their appendages blown off by landmines.

Years later, when he can't sleep, he'll think of the war, or at least his old man's version of it. Those were his bedtime stories, after all, the monotone of his voice lulling Rust to sleep as Travis cleaned his rifle or skinned rabbits. He wanted to tell him to shut the hell up more than once, but he never did. Those stories were a part of his pop, like the gray in his beard and the calluses on his hands. Rust figures they're a part of him, too.

When he's seventeen he comes home one day to find his father standing over the corner of the cabin where Rust keeps his things—bedroll, books, sketches. He holds up the Army recruitment pamphlet that Rust thought he'd hidden.

“Boy, you want to tell me just what the _fuck_ this is?”

He feels fear creep up like ice in the pit of his gut, but he turns away and tries to look preoccupied with removing his boots and gloves. “It's my ticket out of this frozen shithole, that's what it is.”

He finally screws up his courage enough to look up into his father's face. He expects to see fury there, but instead Travis's eyes are filled with tears. He's never seen his pop cry, not even the time he broke his leg out in the woods and Rust had to splint it.

“All those stories I told you all these years. Everything I tried to teach you,” he says. “You never did listen at all, did you?” He crumples the pamphlet up in his fist. “And—now? With the Soviets tryin' to blow up the world? Hell of a sense of timing you've got, son.”

“Someone's always trying to blow someone else up,” Rust says. “ _That's_ what you taught me.”

 

vi. _“Marines, Korea. Never talked about it. You know, there was a time that men didn't air their bullshit to the world.”_

Marty doesn't know anything about the war that he didn't learn from Wikipedia. Years later, after his dad is gone and Marty's own attempt at fatherhood has officially been declared a failure, he'll spend a lot of downtime at Hart Investigative Solutions (and most of his time there is downtime, truth be told) clicking from one link to the next, as if he can somehow finally form a picture of what his old man had really been seeing all those times he seemed to look right through him.

 

vii. _“She was on her tricycle in our driveway. We lived down where there was a little bend in the road, and—they said that—anyway, afterwards.”_

Rust counted the days once. It was right after he shot the tweaker; they'd cuffed him and tossed him in a cell while they were trying to figure out what to do with him, mostly because he was high and raving and no one wanted to be responsible for the damage he'd do with his hands free. “This is _bullshit_ ,” he kept shouting, though if you'd asked him precisely what was bullshit he wouldn't have been able to tell you. So over the next six hours, while they debated the merits of making an example of him versus quietly shipping him off to Brazoria versus handing him to the Task Force so they could get their money's worth out of the psycho before he cracked up for good and all, Rust had stared up at the ceiling and counted up the days. Eight hundred and seventeen, from birth to death. A thousand and twenty-two if you count from the day Claire said “Rust, we need to talk.”

Claire had a Polaroid camera. They couldn't afford a lot of film; otherwise, there might have been at least one picture for every day. As it was, there were just over four hundred of them, kept in an old cookie tin that had been her grandmother's. He sifted through them once, about a week after the funeral. He sat on the kitchen floor with a bottle of Jack and four hundred and two Polaroid photographs while Claire, just down the hall, slept a drugged and dreamless sleep. Sophia laughing, Sophia swimming, Sophia on her first birthday wearing a yellow dress embroidered with bees and the better part of a mint-chocolate-chip ice-cream cake on her face and in her hair. Seventeen pictures featuring her favorite toy, a stuffed penguin that Claire's college roommate had brought back from Sea World—Sophia liked to chew its beak. Twelve of her asleep in her crib the day they got home from the hospital, her curled fists so impossibly small ( _goddamn, Claire, the shutter's too loud, you'll wake her_ ). His fingers move them back and forth across the dusty floor seemingly of their own volition, like a planchette on a Ouija board. He fans them out like a tarot spread, arranges them into blocks and circles and spirals, categorizes them by event or time of day or whether her curls were pulled back in a ponytail. There has to be a pattern, he thinks (although _thinks_ may not be the appropriate word, as drunk as he is). They were all part of her, after all—she was caught in the lightning-flash of the camera's bulb and frozen there, exactly as she was, for a fleeting second. Four hundred and two seconds out of eight hundred seventeen days, and maybe if he can arrange them _just so_ he can— _recreate_ her somehow, pull her back from wherever she is. Because she can't simply be _gone_.

There are four pictures taken a few months before she died—Christmas morning, Sophia under the tree, proudly astride her new red tricycle. These Rust separates from the rest of the stack and sets on fire with his Zippo, right there in the middle of the kitchen floor. They dissolve in a smoldering heap of melted chemicals and scorched linoleum. The sound of the smoke alarm doesn't wake Claire.

She's furious when she finds out he'd destroyed the Christmas photos, then starts in about how they should have bought the video recorder they'd seen on sale at Sears not long after they married. “I'm gonna forget what her laugh sounded like,” she sobs. “I'm gonna forget what her hair smelled like. I'm gonna _forget_.”

“Lucky you,” he says, and she throws a glass pitcher at his head. It hits the wall behind him and shatters. There's shards and scorch marks on the floor now; Rust thinks idly of war zones and then walks out, not mindful of the ash and broken glass on his bare feet.

 

viii. _“I've been a mess, rattled, just—my dad dying—” “Oh my God, that was a year ago.”_

“I don't want you bringin' them around here anymore.”

Marty blinks in surprise, then follows his father's gaze out into the hallway, where Maggie is helping the girls get hot chocolate from a machine near the nurses' station. “What?”

“They ought not have to remember their grandpa like this. And it scares the little one.” He's hazy from painkillers most of the time now, gets Audrey and Maisie confused or forgets their names altogether. He isn't wrong, though. Audrey's old enough to remember her grandfather from better times, before he became a shriveled, twisted thing in a hospital bed, and she puts on a brave face. But Maisie usually has nightmares after these visits. “So I'll say goodbye to them when you leave, and then after today you leave 'em at home when you come. It'll be over soon enough anyway.”

“Dad, c'mon, now. You don't mean that.”

“I reckon I'm old enough to know what I mean and what I don't, and you're not so grown up you can tell your old man what to do.” And that was that; they didn't discuss it further. A week later his father is dead.

Marty's lost a couple of guys on the force over the years, no one that the girls knew, so this is their first time experiencing the three-volley salute. He's so caught up in his own thoughts that he doesn't warn them to cover their ears when the guns go off. Audrey just blinks and goes pale, but Maisie begins to cry. Maggie flashes him a dirty look as she picks up the screaming child and whisks her off to the car ( _I told you she was too young for this_ ), and he just stares ahead numbly as some Marine who doesn't look old enough to shave stands before him with a triangle of folded cloth, reciting some words that don't mean anything. Audrey tugs at his sleeve. “Daddy,” she says, “take the flag.”

A few weeks later he's in the bar around the corner from the station, staring glumly into a glass of Jim Beam and wondering why the hell he hasn't been able to pull himself out of this funk. Someone slides onto the stool next to him—that pretty little court reporter, he can't recall her name.

“Detective Hart,” she says. “You look like you could use some company.”

 

_ix. “When we finally got him over to the house, poor bastard looked like he was on his way to the firing squad.”_

The first Christmas in Louisiana is the hardest, but then again, it's really the first Christmas _since_ , isn't it? Christmases '89 through '92 were spent undercover and it's not like drug cartels really take a holiday break. Doesn't even get cold enough down there near the border to notice it's come and gone. Better that way, especially with what comes nine days after ( _His birthday, then hers; sacrificial lambs both of them, crucified on her little red tricycle_ he thought once and then hoped for a wild desperate moment that God was real and a lightning bolt was coming to take him down for blasphemy). You could disappear into your own veins or up your own nose and surface sometime later, catch a newspaper blowing by your feet advertising a President's Day sale, breathe a sigh of relief that another January third had come and gone in your absence. As for last year, well, the time between Lubbock and Baton Rouge is mostly a blur of panic attacks and cramming for his homicide practicum. His old handler, with something like pity in his eyes, had invited Rust to Christmas dinner and he'd actually laughed, or some sort of approximation of laughter, a brittle sound like cracking ice or the chatter of gunfire—not because the idea of Crash ( _no, not Crash, not anymore_ ) sitting down to a nice domestic scene was absurd (though it was), but because if you'd asked him the date he'd've guessed sometime in late October. He's hallucinating black clouds in the daytime and flashing white lights all night, sleep has become the kind of passing acquaintance that you keep making plans with that always seem to fall through, and the passage of time itself has become sort of a suggestion rather than a rule.

“Cohle,” he'd said in that voice that he'd heretofore only used when he (when _Crash_ ) was high as a fucking kite and needed to be tethered so he didn't float away, “please give the psych pension another thought. Okay? For me?”

Rust became transfixed on the tip of his cigarette for about thirty seconds. Held it in front of his gaze, wondering what kind of sound it would make if he put it in the fucker's eye. _Sssssssss_. “No,” he heard his own voice say finally, as if from a great distance, “I don't believe I'm gonna do anything you tell me to ever again.”

And that was it for Christmas 1993. But no, not this year. This year he's pretending to be a normal person leading a normal life and he's gotta deal with the whole long slow crawl up to the big event. October, with that blond asshole they paired him up with chattering incessantly about his daughters' Halloween costumes; Rust gripped the handle of the passenger-side door hard, tried not to think about Sophia in ladybug-spotted red-and-black felt with pipecleaner antennae ( _Ladybugs don't have antennas, do they? Of course they fucking do, Claire. Don't swear in front of the baby, Rust_ ), tried not to puke up last night's pills. Then Thanksgiving: gunshot victim at 6 p.m.; he calls his partner at home, cringes when the wife answers the phone ( _good evening, Mrs. Hart, this is Rustin Cohle, I'm— I know who you are. Do they seriously expect him down there in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner?_ ). “I'll take care of it,” Rust assures him, and Marty says “What, you ain't got plans?” Rust rubs his temple and then pours a cup of coffee with one hand while gripping the phone too tight with the other: _you've seen my apartment, asshole, do I look like the kind of person who's got plans_.

And now, Christmas. “Look,” Hart says. He's using his _I'm just being reasonable_ voice, which is #3 on Rust's constantly-expanding list of Blond Asshole Voices, right after the _salt of the earth good ol' boy_ voice and the _I'm eight years CID, you jumped-up little prick_ voice. “I can tell you're not exactly a social butterfly.”

Rust makes some kind of noise that communicates little more than his acknowledgment that his partner has spoken.

“And I ain't gonna pretend it's the event of the season or anything. It's Lutz's terrible eggnog and Favre's wife's terrible sugar cookies with the damn red and green sprinkles, and sooner or later Steve's gonna get smashed and pull out the karaoke machine and do eight rounds of 'Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.' Happens every year.”

“You're not exactly selling it, Marty.”

“Well, I don't want to mislead you into thinkin' we're a classy bunch.”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“All's I'm saying is, the Major takes a lot of stock in this kinda thing. One big family, part of the unit, all that. Could hurt your chance at promotion down the line if you don't show.”

“I don't care about that.” The present feels hazy at best these days, and the future has slid into almost total abstraction. Rust stares out the window and wonders what he can say to distract Marty from the subject of the goddamn office Christmas party. Maybe get him on the subject of his college-era sexual exploits, that always keeps him going for awhile. Using Blond Asshole Voice #7, _let me sing you the song of my dick_.

“Fine. Don't do it for your career, then. Do it because after he's done with karaoke Steve's gonna take his pants off and run around the station with them wrapped around his head like a turban, and then he's gonna go out back and fire his gun into the air and then the Major's gonna hit the roof and put the fear of God into him right in front of everyone and Steve'll shit himself and cry. That _also_ happens every year. Do you really wanna miss it? Because it's pretty clear that you like Geraci about as much as he likes you.”

Rust almost feels a smile coming on, then—maybe this guy understands him better than he thought.

An hour, he decides. He will go for an hour; he'll time it by his watch. (The North Shore therapist said he had to hold himself accountable for things, as if he ever fucking hasn't a day in his life.) He'll walk around the periphery of the lobby with a cup of terrible eggnog, not drinking it because it's probably nine-tenths Captain Morgan. People will see him and remember he was there but will be too drunk to realize that he never actually interacted with anyone. Then he will go home and be grateful not to have to deal with this bullshit for another year.

Instead he lasts about ten minutes before the stress of trying to make eye contact and the smell coming out of the paper cup (it's more like eleven-twelfths Captain Morgan) overwhelms him. He looks around desperately for his partner, not because he actually desires his presence but because he needs a distraction and Marty's the only person here who'd be willing to have an actual conversation with him. But Marty's nowhere to be found, which means he's probably in the records room with that little blonde piece from the courthouse. Rust really wishes they would find somewhere else; they always end up on the desk with the files from the open cases and they knock everything on the floor and when Marty picks it back up again he never puts the pages in the right fucking order.

So Rust sneaks upstairs to steal the evidence key from Favre's desk and spends the rest of the night in the lobby leaning up against the wall next to the Christmas tree, carefully balancing his weight so he doesn't topple over. Methylphenobarbital—if that's what it is, Lutz filled out the form and he has atrocious handwriting—makes the lights on the tree glitter and dance. He hasn't had a Christmas tree since '88, a pathetic plastic thing ( _you're such a fucking snob about trees, Rust. We are not going to find one of your majestic mountain hemlocks here in Texas_ ) disguised in about six packages worth of tinsel. Claire fucking loved tinsel. The sight of it made his teeth ache and he was always worried Sophia would grab a handful and eat it. _Just let her be a kid, Rust, God looks out for drunks and little children, didn't you know that?_ You'd think he'd have been a little more laid back, considering the nature of his own childhood.

His old man always made sure there was a tree, a real one. Not inside—not really enough room—but they'd find an evergreen close to the cabin and wind it about with strings of cranberries and popcorn. The deer ate it all off within days, of course, but it was nice to look at until they did. He feels his eyes slipping shut and he can see it now, purplish-red and bluish-green against a blank white sky. No money for gifts most years but on Christmas morning there would be pancakes, not very good pancakes but his pop knew they were Rust's favorite. The sonofabitch had _tried_ , after all. No one ever seems to understand that when Rust tries to explain his upbringing, which is why he doesn't try to explain it often. He can smell burnt flour and powdered eggs and honey and it's the first memory in a long while that doesn't tie his guts into knots so he lets it overtake him, not even noticing that he's starting to slide slowly down the wall.

He comes to suddenly when he smells smoke and realizes that the tip of his cigarette has just set a row of decorative paper snowflakes on fire. If anyone notices, they don't say anything. Probably because Geraci's projectile vomiting has started.

 

x. _“Back then, not sleeping, I'd lay awake thinking about women. My daughter, my wife. I mean, it's like something's just got your name on it, like a bullet or a nail in the road.”_

Somewhere around four in the morning is the worst, because that's when the birds start in, reminding you that yesterday has officially become today; that all living organisms are compelled to sleep, fuck, and eat, and lately you're batting zero on the first two and kind of hit-and-miss with the third.

(“ _Maggie thinks you don't eat enough_ ,” Marty says, shoving half a box of cupcakes left over from Maisie's birthday party into Rust's hands. He doesn't like sweets, so he arranges them in a pyramid on his back stoop, and sits and smokes and watches the ants take them. It takes four hours for every crumb to disappear.)

He rolls over on the mattress, staring bleakly at the wall as if he could _see_ sleep there, dancing just out of his reach, mocking him. He feels like bleached bones in the desert, like everything has been stripped from his skeleton and crammed into his head and now it's too heavy to carry. He feels like a death march.

He rolls onto his side, then his back, then his side again. It's no good; the mattress springs squeak like wheels.

Just at six, on the cusp of day when it's too late for the little rest he'll get to do any good, he sleeps and dreams of apocalyptic landscapes: burned husks of buildings like collapsing, rotten fruit, moldering corpses swinging from lush, verdant trees. Structures of bone, bright holocausts, burning air. Cities of ash that collapse when you touch them.

 

xi. _“I'll tell it the same way that I told the shooting board and every cop bar between Houston and Biloxi, and you know why the story is always the same? Because it only went down the one way.”_

Marty opens his mouth, thinks better of it, closes it. Reconsiders. Inhales to speak. Exhales again. Coughs to try to play it off.

“Out with it, Marty.”

“It's nothing.” He gets a skeptical look in response. “No, it's nothing, really.”

“You ever notice how the weight you wanna give your statements is always inversely proportional to how much weight they actually have?”

“Shut up.” He takes another breath, deeper this time. “I was just thinking about how things went down with Ledoux. I mean, how they _really_ went down.”

Rust sighs, tilts his head back, closes his eyes. “Thought we agreed we didn't need to discuss that anymore.”

“Yeah, I know. I've just been wondering something about your cover story.”

“Nothing wrong with my cover story. It's a perfectly good cover story. It's held out fine for the last year.”

“Christ, I never said it wasn't.” Marty runs his hands nervously along the steering wheel. He thinks of Rust in the backseat, eyes like black beetles starting from his skull, gloves tight around his knuckles: _go, go, go_. Rust getting wearily out of his truck, soaked with sweat, the bones in his face too prominent, pale as a corpse. Rust's voice on the radio, ragged and breathless: _Marty, you got him? You fucking better, the shit I've been though_.

“I'm just wondering,” he finally says, “why you made me out to be the hero in that scenario.”

“You never seemed to mind much.” The longer Marty knows Rust, the more he thinks he has two modes: overtly judgmental and quietly judgmental. It's the latter he's hearing now.

Truth is he would've gone along with it if Rust had told the shooting board that aliens came down and clocked Ledoux. He was a fucking disaster zone, standing in front of that ramshackle trailer in the middle of nowhere, watching his career bleed out on the ground along with his marriage and family. But Rust—Rust was a live wire, real and _present_ in a way he hadn't been once in those first three months. When the sound of gunfire echoing finally trailed off, he gave the barrel a perfunctory swipe with his dirty t-shirt before dropping it in the dirt next to Ledoux. He gestured emphatically with two fingers: “Here's what happened. Ledoux opened fire and we split off. I got behind that boat there, you dug into the woods, ran up around back, dropped him when you came up around the side. Then Dewall took off and blew his own ass up, and after that we did a sweep and found the kids. You got it?”

A weak nod.

“Marty. Say you got it.”

“I got it.”

“Quit worrying. They'll buy it, and even if they don't, it ain't worth their trouble to send you up. Trust me on that.”

And that was that. He didn't feel bad about the lie; he'd fucked up a hundred times in a hundred different ways over the last year and putting Ledoux down was the only thing he'd done lately he _didn't_ feel bad about. Not too worried about getting found out, either; Rust was right. If anyone did spot the cracks in their story, they'd look the other way.

After that it was a haze of applause and hearty slaps on the back, of someone else always picking up the tab, of even Maggie wrapping her arms around his neck when he came by to see the girls: _I'm so glad you weren't hurt, Marty_. And so he'd ridden the wave of everyone else's approval for three weeks, until Quesada pulled him into his office and told him he was getting promoted to sergeant. “What about Rust?” he said, and Quesada answered, “What about him?”

And just like that, the glow that had enveloped him fell sharply away. _You were starting to fall for your own bullshit again, Hart_ , he thought; well, it certainly wasn't the first time and it probably wouldn't be the last. But he knew the truth: that he wasn't any hero. He was the asshole who sat in a car reading Rust's heavily annotated copy of _Twilight of the Idols_ while his partner ran into the belly of the beast. He was the guy who had let his anger get the better of him when he found those kids, and Rust was the one who had kept a level head. And Rust was getting fuck-all for his trouble, while Marty was the man of the hour. Everyone's smiles felt forced after that, their eyes flat. Like they knew. _Coward_. _Liar_. He was beset with visions of newspaper headlines: in the place of _Hero Detectives Stop Killer, Save Girl_ it was _Hero Detective Revealed as Fraud: Corruption in the State Police_.

“Well no, I didn't _mind_ ,” he says now. “But you could have come up with a version where you got all the glory instead. I'm just wondering why you didn't. Humility ain't exactly one of your virtues.”

“I didn't want all that attention anyway.”

“Not even you'd go to that much trouble to avoid having to talk to people. You would've gotten that promotion, not me. You could've bought a third lawn chair with the raise. Hell, you could've bought a _bed_.” He gets a ghost of a smile at that; you'd have to put a gun to his head to get the sonofabitch to admit it, but Rust has loosened up a lot over the last year.

He lights a cigarette and stares out the window contemplatively for a moment.

“We needed a story they'd believe,” he says finally. “No one'd buy me for the hero.”

 

xii. _“Nightmares, PTSD, exhausted nerves, whatever.”_

Once Marty knows about Sophia, about Crash, about the occasional unpredictable quirks of his post-undercover brain chemistry (though not about North Shore; he feels like that would be pushing it), Rust starts to worry a little less about retaining the illusion of sanity. “Hang on, I'm seein' orange smoke trails right now,” he'll say, or: “why don't you just hang back a minute,” Marty says on days when Rust is clutching his cigarettes too tight and his heart is hammering in his throat for no good reason—“I'm gonna go start baggin' evidence, you join us when you're ready.”

As two years in Louisiana bleed into three, sleep starts coming round again, like an old dog you thought you'd seen the last of. Never when he's expecting it, at first, nor when he wants it, and so he finds himself drifting off in the car—he feels more settled there, somehow, than anywhere else, tires against tarmac rocking him into unconsciousness. Only somewhere down in the darkness of a twenty-minute slumber Crash pokes his ugly head up again, and he feels gunfire chattering in his head, breath whistling in and out of his nose, muscles burning—

—and he awakes with a yell that startles Marty so much he nearly runs off the road.

“Shit. You okay?”

 _Fine, shut the fuck up_ but the words can't seem to find their way out. There are stones in his throat, on his chest. He's pretty sure he's about to puke. He bends forward and presses his sweaty forehead against the dashboard; he can _feel_ his heartbeat in his ears.

He's only dimly aware of Marty pulling over the car, unbuckling Rust's seatbelt and forcibly turning him sideways. “Just—put your head between your knees, man. Breathe.”

 _I know what I'm doing_ , he wants to say, _this isn't my first time at this particular rodeo_ but all the air seems to have been pressed out of his chest. He leans over, sucks down a lungful of hot, damp June air, and then vomits all over the ground, missing Marty's shoes by inches.

“Don't tell Quesada,” he says weakly, when he can speak again.

“You got it,” Marty replies. “Figures you'd do this on a day it's my turn to pay for lunch. Waste of ten bucks.”

 

xiii. _“He was a survivalist, I guess you'd call it. Had some pretty fucking strange ideas. There's nothing like the night sky out there, though.”_

Rust doesn't _reminisce_ , not the way Marty does. Meaning is historical: memories, contextual. “I'll take this heat over five feet of snow any day,” he'll say; or, “I saw a guy looked like that once, after the bears had been at 'im” when a body is pulled from a gator-infested lake. He's a puzzle with mostly missing pieces and Marty puts together what he can, eying the edges of empty spaces, looking for patterns. He knows that Rust's dad taught him to hunt and trap and dress meat, to build a shelter, to find your way out of the woods; he knows Rust grew up without television and suspects he grew up with a lot less than that. He knows that his mom wasn't around and that no power on earth will get Rust to say how he feels about _that_ , which tells Marty all he needs to know anyway.

He knows that his partner knows more than anyone he's ever met on the job about just what it takes to kill a man, and that he learned most of it at his father's knee. What a bullet does to a skull, what an explosion does to a limb, what an injury does to the flesh in humid climes.

He knows Rust doesn't look happy (or his approximation of happy, anyway) when he talks about his childhood, not the way he does when he talks about seeing Drivin N Cryin perform twice in '96 or that time a baby chipmunk got into Claire's dorm room and they had to chase it out. But he doesn't exactly look sad, either—none of the bruised, brittle monotone when he said _we had a baby girl; she died_.

Later, when he tells Gilbough and Papania that Rust didn't say much about his family, it's not a lie, exactly. After all, the two dozen or so utterances he let slip in seven years wouldn't be considered “much” by regular people. But what he's got was like chiseling precious jewels out of a rough stone—Marty's not just handing them over, not to these two assholes who don't, couldn't understand the man who uttered them.

 

xiv. _“You know I think about my daughter now—you know what she was spared? Sometimes I feel grateful.”_

Every January third he feels the number click over in his mind, a new ghost haunting the periphery of his vision. Sophia at five, getting on the bus for her first day of school. Sophia at eight, having her first fight with her best friend. Sophia at sixteen, learning to drive. First date, first job. Only the old Sophias don't go away; by the time he enters Carcosa there will be two dozen of them, standing around him in a ring like a children's game. They hang back sometimes but they never recede entirely.

Marty doesn't know Sophia's birthday. He knows Rust gets a little antsy around the end of the year, though; figures maybe it's the Christmas season, or maybe just how much the sonofabitch hates the cold. He tries to go a little easier on him that time of year, ignores the rants about the commodification of goodwill, brings him decaf. Keeps the radio tuned to the one station they can agree on.

 

xv. _“You may not remember, but you and I met a long time ago.”_

After Rust leaves Louisiana, he's got Kelly Reider in the back of his skull all the way north. He drinks until she stops screaming: _his face, his face_.

 

xvi. _“Man's game charges a man's price. Take that away from this if nothing else.”_

Ten years gone and Marty still dreams about that fucking barn. He knows the kids are in there but he can't get in, scrapes his knuckles bloody until the catch in the door finally gives. But it's never them, the dead boy and the living girl. It's always Audrey. Not Audrey now at nineteen ( _she doesn't want to see you, Marty_ ) or Audrey at nine when it happened ( _Dad's never shot anybody_ ) but Audrey when she was three or four and running around like a little hellion and he was so scared, always so scared that she'd trip and fall or get a fever or stick her finger in a socket. Audrey is three or four and riding around that filthy place in circles, spiraling around the dirty mattress on a little red tricycle, and even in the dream he thinks _where did that come from_ , Audrey never had one of those, he only remembers a pink bike with training wheels and glittery streamers hanging from the handlebars.

He doesn't know why Audrey's on a red tricycle because he doesn't remember that the night after Ledoux, when they went back to Rust's place and laid on the mattress, half-delirious (Marty from relief, Rust from the last of the coke leaving his system) and drinking the rest of the whiskey—right before he'd drifted off to sleep, cheekbone shoved against the sharp curve of his partner's shoulder, Rust had told him about Sophia. The whole story, from the screech of tires all the way down to the whine of a flatlining heart monitor, and somewhere in the middle, the squeal of tricycle wheels.

 

xvii. _“But who can remember way back? That's how it all started. Memory be fucked.”_

He feels the rough edges melting off him the further south he drives, his vision clearing. He finds himself remembering the early years in Louisiana with a queer sort of nostalgia—the way working a case gave him a sense of clarity, purpose. Kept all the frayed and ragged bits of himself knotted together. It feels like that sometimes, now: making notes on the familiar pages of his ledger. Papering the walls of his storage unit with maps and timelines and family trees. Staying sober enough to do the work, at least some of the time.

And he's doing pretty well, too, until that first interview.

“Shepherd's Flock? Why are you asking me about _that_ place?” The smile is too warm, too coy, but Toby Boelert's eyes are hard like two chips of coal. Reminds him of that girl Lucy back in '95, a bit—the hollow, guarded flirtatiousness of the professional sex worker. But Rust says _there was a lot of talk going around_ and the mask breaks, voice falters—

“I decided it all had to be a dream anyways, and I don't remember if it—we'd go to sleep.” That word keeps resurfacing, _remember_ , always negated—“One girl. I don't remember her name. She first started talking about it. She seen it, too, the faces. I do _not_ remember her name.” “Three younger men. I don't remember them.” As if it's not a sin of omission but something studied and deliberate; Rust wonders how much time has been given over to the act of not remembering.

Toby wraps a lipsticked mouth sweet and slow around the words _all burned up_ and lets Rust pay for three rounds of drinks, but doesn't offer anything else of use. Kid's got a pretty good act going, he'll admit that, long as you don't notice the cigarette tip, how the ashes are always short and sharp from too much flicking, too much fidgeting. But Christ, looking into those eyes is like looking in a mirror—one that reflects back to '93 or so, when he got his walking papers from North Shore and then spat in the face of the proffered psych pension. That clinging, shrieking determination to be more than the worst thing that ever happened to you.

He doesn't get back to the storage unit until nearly three a.m. He figures he'll just write up his notes and then try to get some sleep on the cot he keeps in the corner on nights when he's a little too tired or a little too drunk to get behind the wheel of his truck. But he can't get it out of his head, that voice, brittle under its deceptive lilt: _who can remember way back?_

Toby would have been about four, then; Marie, eight. He can picture cropped hair and boy's clothes, a quiet, serious child like himself. Marie he's seen from a dozen missing child fliers: cornsilk hair, a shy smile. Shepherd's Flock, Light of the Way, Queen of Angels, another half-dozen of those damnable places scattered up and down the rural coast. Small schools, usually with no more than ten or fifteen to a class. Still— _don't do the math, just don't_ , he begs himself but he never could help it ( _eight hundred seventeen days, eight hundred fifteen if you don't count the coma because by then she was already gone_ )

—that's a thousand children. Maybe more. Even with the schools all shut down before Dora Lange was found—how many young men and women had they (whoever the fuck _they_ were) gone after in the seven years that he and Marty had been lulled into complacency by their apparent success, and then how many more in the decade since? A dozen? A hundred? Closing the case on Ledoux, pushing so hard on Tuttle that he got himself kicked off the job, letting all that bullshit with Marty and Maggie drive him off, hiding away in a self-pitying, drunken stupor for _ten fucking years_ —

How many had died because of what he didn't do? How many had begged for death beforehand?

Rust doesn't sleep for three days after that, but when he finally does, he dreams of the place down in Sulphur, of thick ferns and strangling vines. Only in the dream he's sure it's not Louisiana; it's some village he can't pronounce, and there's land mines under every step. _We're gonna die out here_ , Marty says, in the same voice that he uses to say _I think I'll stop and grab us some coffee_ , and Rust just nods.

He gets Ledoux out the door and on his knees, but then when he turns and looks up over his shoulder at Rust it's not that bleached-blond tattooed methhead anymore but an old man with a four-hundred-dollar haircut, and he smiles the toothy, flat-eyed shark-smile of the righteous and says: _I've seen more souls lost down a bottle than any pit_.

 

xviii. _“Stop. Really, man. Stop. I don't want to hear it.”_

Every so often the nurse comes by with a pill. Marty isn't sure how often—the batteries in the clock on the wall opposite him are dead and Audrey keeps closing the window shade, “there's nothing out there to look at anyway, Dad”—but he's got enough confidence in modern medicine to assume there's some sort of schedule for this kind of thing. After he takes the pill the ache in his chest and his head begins to ebb, and then a grayish-green haze washes over everything and he feels like he's being pulled back down into the darkness again, into that bramble-strangled pit of bones and he tries to yell _here, we're here_ but his mouth doesn't work. And then time passes and he can feel himself swimming up again and he drags his eyes open and croaks: “How's Rust?”

Maggie doesn't look up from her magazine. “Same as the last time you asked.” A hint of annoyance is starting to creep into her voice and he begins to suspect that his brushes with death no longer carry the same charm for her that they did seventeen years ago.

“When was that?”

She doesn't answer. It's true that there's something that feels curiously familiar about the conversation, but he's not sure how many times they've actually had it and how many times he's just dreamt it.

“What did the doctor say?”

She closes the magazine and puts on her placid face. “You've got a sternal fracture and some broken ribs. They're going to want to keep you a while to make sure that there's no organ damage and to keep you from moving around too much. Probably a couple more weeks.”

“No. Not about me.”

She sighs, but there's something softer in her face now, something akin to pity. “He's still out, Marty. They won't know how bad the brain damage is until he wakes up.”

“But he will, though? I mean, the doctors think he will, right?”

She opens her magazine again, and Marty stares at the ceiling for awhile. The nurse comes back in with a pill. He hears a chatter of gunfire, wakes up with a gasp and realizes it's just a flock of birds taking off outside the window. Maisie's pulled up the shade.

“No change,” she says, before her father can ask. She pulls a small pink bottle out of her pocket, sits cross-legged in the recliner in the corner, and starts to paint her nails. She stays until Lutz comes by with one of those stupid giant balloons with a teddy bear inside. They play cards for awhile.

He doesn't remember drifting off again, but he resurfaces when he feels a persistent poking at his shoulder. “Dad. Hey, Dad.”

He throws up an arm as if to ward off some inevitable blow and Audrey backs up sharply, spilling drops of stale hospital coffee on the bedsheets. The shades are closed again but he can see anemic early-morning light peeking through. “Oh, I'm sorry, honey. I think I was havin' a bad dream or something.”

“It's okay.” She rubs at a spot of coffee on her t-shirt. Marty thinks of her at eight, clutching a cup of hot chocolate in a room much like this one— _bye, Grandpa, see you next time_. “Rust woke up a few hours ago. Thought you'd wanna know.”

He starts to sit up, wincing at the pull of stitches against his skin. “I'll go see him.”

“You can't get up, not for a couple more days. The doctor said so.”

“I can't just—”

“He's pretty much still out of it, but Mom went in for a minute. She told him you'd been asking about him and he said for you to go fuck yourself.” She blushes a little, in the manner of a grown child unaccustomed to cursing around her father; Marty still remembers the last time he heard her use that word, the way she chucked it at his head like a weapon.

Marty leans his head back against the pillow and tries to breathe.

 

xix. _“I don't dwell on the past.” “Well, that must be nice.”_

They don't talk with each other, precisely, so much as _at_ each other. Marty talks about basketball scores, Audrey's art shows, Maisie's law school applications, and his latest fishing exploits (many of them exaggerated). He talks about things he's seen online, articles about the health benefits of green tea, funny news stories—“hey, Rust, there's this bear up in Alaska that busted through a skylight at a kid's birthday party and ate up all the cupcakes.”

Rust talks about what he's reading, mostly. Political biographies this week; Spanish poetry the week before. He has a library card and when Marty's chatter starts to become oppressive he goes and hides among the stacks.

Marty asks what he got to up in Alaska these last few years; Rust asks about the cases Marty worked with CID and, later, at his private firm. They both demur; truth is, Rust doesn't remember much about the last decade, and Marty doesn't want to. They don't talk about the '95 case or its 2012 conclusion or about Maggie. They don't talk about the fact that Marty's drinking a little more than he used to and sleeping too much, or that Rust is drinking less but sleeping hardly at all.

Rust doesn't say _I was scared all those years that you still hated me_  and Marty doesn't say _I was scared all those years that you didn't think of me at all_. Instead they pour coffee, scramble eggs, go for long drives with the radio turned loud.

 

xx. _“This is a world where nothing is solved. Everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again, and that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again and again and again forever.”_

Marty doesn't move when he dreams, save for a slight constricting of the brow, a trembling of the mouth. But bitten-off whimpers rise up from somewhere deep in his chest, growing gradually louder before culminating in a single, wordless shout.

Rust finds the wound in his gut makes it hurt to crouch too long, so he picks up a kitchen chair and carries it—carefully, so it doesn't knock against the doorway—and sets it down beside the bed. “Marty,” he says quietly, “hey, Marty.” He puts a hand to his forehead and brushes back the short, thinning strands on his crown. “Sssh, man, sssh.”

“Rust,” he says. “I can't find you.”

Rust presses his thumbs against the bridge of his nose wearily. First time he's fallen asleep in days. “Marty, you're not in there anymore, we're in your apartment, man. It's a dream.”

“I can't find you. It's dark.”

Rust doesn't dream of Carcosa; he wasn't afraid in Carcosa; he was _finished_. He dreams of Pelican Island instead, of vine-strangled brick walls and murky puddles, hymnals swollen with moisture, pale weeping virgins. He's soundless when he sleeps but he thrashes, kicks, twists the sheets like nooses around his limbs. Knocks the futon clear off its frame, once. He wakes with bruised knuckles, plaster knocked out. Marty hears the hollow thud of Rust's elbow on the other side of the thin wall, followed by a sharp intake of breath. He drags himself from bed, cursing under his breath, half-awake thoughts uncharitable— _goddamn sonofabitch making a racket_ —and bends over the futon. He puts a hand on Rust's shoulder and shakes gently, and a fist shoots out—“Whoa, man. Whoa. _Whoa_.” He grabs Rust lightly around the wrist and pushes his arm back down.

“Marty?” the sleep-drunk voice answers. “What the fuck?”

“You're dreamin' again, man.”

“Aww fuck. Sorry—woke you—”

Rust never apologizes, not when he's awake. But the next morning he lets Marty bandage his elbow without too much grousing.

 

xxi. _“Anything I left back there, I don't need.”_

“Marty?”

“Right here, man.” Rust is finally starting to sound drowsy. That's good. The sun is starting to come up. “Shut the fuck up,” he mutters at a bird cawing just outside the window. Oh, well, he can sleep in tomorrow—today, that is—perk of being your own boss.

It's been a bad night. Rust won't tell him what the dream was about, which means it was about Sophia.

“Talk to me.”

“No. You need to go the fuck to sleep.”

“Yeah. I figure you're so fuckin' boring you'll put me right out.” Marty smiles in spite of himself. “You can even tell the cheerleader threesome story again if you want.”

“Why? You didn't believe me last time.” He leans his head back against the futon, right up against Rust's bony knee. “Hey. Did you know that back in '94 you set some Christmas decorations on fire?”

A tired chuckle. “I didn't think anyone noticed.”


End file.
